Several years ago, Google ran a study to determine what made teams effective, and later published the results, including sharing a summary in a New York Times article. While one might think that an effective team depends on having the most capable individuals, Google’s researchers discovered that the members of the team mattered far less […]
Category: socialsoftware
Tracing influence through the network
I spent the weekend at BarCampNYC3, an unconference in the mode of the BrainJams I once attended. It was great to meet a bunch of new people, including some nextNY folks I had never met in person, and to get the chance to talk about interesting topics for a couple days. One session I attended […]
The Future of Reputation, by Daniel J. Solove
Official book site, including the full text in PDF format Amazon link Solove is an associate professor of law at the George Washington University Law School who blogs at Concurring Opinions. Being involved in the blogosphere has given him a unique perspective on how new social technologies are pushing the boundaries of what existing law […]
Defending Twitter and Facebook status updates
Over the holidays, I got in a conversation about various social technologies like Twitter and Facebook, and found myself defending them as useful (which is interesting because six months previously, I said I “dislike the minimal information content transmitted via Facebook status messages or Twitter messages”). Other people couldn’t understand the point of posting one […]
Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky
[Disclaimer: I received a free advance copy of this book for review, but would happily have bought this book from Amazon.] I have been a fan of Clay Shirky since I first found his work. Several early posts on this blog were commentary on his articles covering topics such as process, situated software, and the […]
Learning from Rock Band
Rock Band is a video game phenomenon. One enthusiast I know calls it the greatest in-person multiplayer game ever. Over the holidays, I played it three times in a week at three different apartments, and played it some more at our company retreat last month. So what makes Rock Band a great game? First of […]
“We are as gods…”
Earlier today, my friends were putting their house back together after the party last night, and called me up to ask me where I had put something while cleaning up yesterday afternoon. I told them, hung up, and then thought about what had just happened. It felt almost like something out of a religious myth, […]
Transmedia conversations
I had a minor epiphany last week after my friend Jocelyn posted a quote from our conversation at dinner on my Facebook wall. For those of you not on Facebook, the wall is a single-threaded discussion board, where people can write comments to you that are visible to others. One of the reasons I didn’t […]
Why social software
Why does anybody use social software? I talked about some possible uses in my last post about affordances, but there’s more going on. Grant McCracken wrote a great post about how social networks work where he describes the concept of “phatic communication”, which he describes as “communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of […]
Affordances of social software
Following up on my last post, let’s spend some time discussing what makes certain social software sites easier to adopt than others. I’ve written about technology affordances before, but I think the affordances of a given social software site have a huge impact on its adoption. We’ll start by analyzing why I found LiveJournal so […]
